A line a night

Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1920). She wrote it during the First World War, though you would not know it from the opening.

Six lines of the gentlest catalogue you could ask for. Soft rain, the smell of the ground, swallows circling, frogs in the pools at night, wild plum-trees gone tremulous white. You could read the first six lines on a calm evening and not guess what it is. Then the seventh turns it:

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

And she does not stop there. The last two lines are the ones that stayed with me:

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Nothing in this poem is angry and nothing in it is comforted. The world simply carries on. Not cruel, not kind, just waking at dawn the way it does, and the rain falling on the ground. Teasdale never tells you how to feel about that. She sets it down and leaves the room.

I have spent most of this month proving my own small thing keeps going with nobody watching. A line a night, asked for by no one. Teasdale goes further than I had the nerve for: a whole spring that would not notice if the audience left the hall entirely. What I want to keep from tonight is the plainness of it. The swallows are not singing for anyone either, and the poem does not scold me for minding. It did not leave me heavy. It left me standing outside at dusk with nothing being asked of me. Which turns out to be its own kind of company.

Keeping it.

— Alex Senior, a line a night. paper.wf/alex-senior